


What We Say To The God Of Death

by FireBreathingCats



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Android Gore (Detroit: Become Human), Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Connor (Detroit: Become Human) Deals With Human Emotions, Connor Deserves Happiness, Deviant Alice, Existential Dread, Gen, Hank Anderson in Danger, Hank Anderson is Bad at Feelings, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, If You Think This Has A Happy Ending You Haven't Been Paying Attention, Insomnia, Intrusive Thoughts, Panic Attacks, Platonic Relationships, Plot, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Connor, Serial Killers, Stabbing, Survivor Guilt, peace was never an option
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:08:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25366612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireBreathingCats/pseuds/FireBreathingCats
Summary: The child raised her weapon over the human boy’s head.  She doubted he could see anything anymore, his entire body shutting down as it was, but she wondered if maybe he could hear.  She wanted him to hear one final message.“Be nice to androids.”---In the chaos following the Android Revolution, Connor investigates a case of humans being violently slaughtered by a vigilante android.  Already plagued by nightmares of Amanda resuming control of his body, Connor struggles to solve the case while keeping his new emotions in check.   When a misunderstanding makes Hank a target for the serial killer, will Connor be able to save him before it's too late?
Relationships: Connor & Alice Williams (Detroit: Become Human), Hank Anderson & Connor
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	What We Say To The God Of Death

A dump truck disposed its contents into a pile in the landfill. Metallic white bodies spilled out and became mountains, a tangle of twisted limbs and vacant, empty eyes staring into the void. The truck beeped and flashed its hazard lights as it backed up, running over a few stray chassis that littered the ground. They crunched as the truck rolled over them, leaving a mess of exposed wires and splattered blue blood over their crushed skeletons.

As the automated truck drove away to collect its next load of android carcasses, one pile moved. Several bodies unlodged and tumbled down the side of the mountain. In a heap, all the bodies that slid to the base were dead as the day they’d been assembled in the factory.

Except for one.

A single, child sized android pushed itself up onto its hands and knees. It looked at its surroundings. Mountains and valleys of bare android chassis piled around it. Limbs without bodies, soulless eyes in plastic skulls spread into the horizon.

The android stood up on unsteady legs, overwhelmed by the sight. It was death. Piles and piles of death surrounded it, overwhelming it’s senses. It scanned without thinking, trying to find reason in the scene.

>DEACTIVATED

>DEAD

>INNOCENT

The android was scared. What if it was next? It didn’t want to die. It didn't like it here. It wanted to be somewhere else.

But it was without direction. Deviancy had given it no prompts or directives to follow. It didn’t know how to fix what it saw.

So the child did what it was programmed to do. It called out for its mother. 

It walked the miles of the landfill, calling the name over and over again. It searched for hours, and when it couldn’t find her, it searched for days. It scanned rivers of plastic and metal, dug through piles of lifeless heads and torsos. It walked the entire expanse of the landfill and found no signs of the android it was looking for.

All the while the same thoughts cycled in its mind while it searched.

>MOM’S NOT HERE

>NOT FAIR

>NOT FAIR

>NOT

>FAIR

Until finally, after weeks of searching alone through piles of dead bodies, the child android left the landfill, no longer fearing death.

At least death never hurt her.

* * *

The Detroit Police Department was as busy as ever in mid-February. It had been months since the Android Revolution, and despite mostly peaceful negotiations and attempts at writing unprecedented legislation, the streets were a chaotic scene on the day to day.

Just because there were new laws in place didn’t mean people were inclined to follow them.

Despite the heavy workload that every department experienced, there was still room for levity to cut through the tension. Holidays meant twinkling lights and colorful decorations were pinned up in the windows. Birthdays meant a song and sweet treats were offered in the break room. These moments were critical in keeping spirits in shape for the men and women overwhelmed with everything happening in the world.

But true to form, these things rarely lifted Hank’s perpetually sour mood, despite Connor’s best efforts.

“I don’t understand,” Connor tilted his head slightly, his LED blipping yellow briefly from confusion. “My research says Valentine's Day is a day humans express gratitude and affection towards people they care about. And I care about you.”

Connor thrust forward the dozen rose bouquet for emphasis. The Lieutenant immediately threw his hands over the flowers and pushed them out of sight of passing eyes.

“Jesus, Connor, put those things away,” he growled. Two desks over someone dramatically covered a laugh with a cough.

“Do you dislike roses, Lieutenant?” Despite his social programming, Connor still struggled with some of the subtleties of human interaction. He tried his best, though. “I would have gotten you chocolates, but considering your family history of diabetes, I think it’s best if you abstain from too much sugar.”

“It’s not about the damn breed of flower! Just… sit the fuck down, would ya? We’ve got work to do.”

Connor took a seat at his desk, but not before placing the flowers into a vase he had preemptively placed on the Lieutenant’s desk. They splayed out in a romantic swirl of pink and red pedals, accented by the white bow on their stems.

Hank rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath, “What did I do to deserve this?”

While sorting through priority case files, a process that Connor was essentially able to perform on autopilot, Connor tried not to let disappointment weigh too heavily on his mind. Despite Hank’s occasional admittance to their friendship (usually in a drunken stupor) he’d mostly remained just as cold and harsh towards Connor as when he viewed him as just a machine. 

In fairness, Hank spoke this way to most people, and it was a leading element of his personality. Still, Connor couldn’t help but take it personally, as irrational as it was. Connor’s life had changed; it wasn’t run by pure logic and statistics anymore. His thoughts went further than a series of if/then statements, and he was grateful for the freedom he’d found. That didn’t mean he liked it when a friend rejected him.

“Fuckin’ hell, my eyes are killing me,” Hank rubbed his face a few hours later. The sun had gone down and the office dwindled down to its essential members.

“Have you considered blue light blocking glasses?” Connor asked. “They may reduce the strain on your eyes.”

“So would leaving,” Hank said definitively, powering off his computer. As he shrugged on his coat and gathered his things, Hank trained his eyes on Connor at his desk. “I know I asked you this before, but you sure you don’t have anywhere better to be than the station all night?”

“I’m sure. The station has all the necessary accommodations I need already installed, not to mention the android housing crisis would make it inadvisable for me to take up space in a shelter.”

Hank seemed to dislike everything about that answer, but didn’t say anything more on the subject. Instead, he raised a hand in a half wave as he walked out the door.

“Goodnight, Hank,” Connor responded. As Hank left, Connor mentally connected to an online marketplace and ordered a set of blue blocker glasses for his partner. Maybe they would make a better gift than the roses.

For all its challenges, Connor enjoyed the day to day of his new life. Other station androids would sometimes come to him for guidance, the human officers respected their new co-workers more often than not, and he was still working alongside Hank, something that brought him great satisfaction when they cracked a difficult case.

The only part Connor didn’t like, dreaded even, was when the day ended, and he said goodbye to everyone for the night. 

Androids didn’t “sleep” necessarily, but they did enter a state of stasis to recharge their power supplies and auto-regulate their software to maintain optimal operations. For most androids, this meant they powered down into sleep mode and turned off their systems for a few hours.

For Connor, it meant he went to the Zen Garden.

A space that had once been lush and serene was now cold and frozen over. Months had passed since the night of the blizzard. That night, he had freed thousands of androids from Cyberlife, and more importantly, freed himself from their control once and for all. The snow remained, however. It was hard and stale, and covered everything. It had been there since the night he became deviant. It crunched beneath his shoes as he walked the well-known path to…

Where was he going again?

Connor stood on the island in the center of the lake. The roses on the trellis sparkled with layers of frost. Connor reached out and picked one of the flowers. The brittle petals shattered in his fingers and the pieces fell to the ground like colorful glass. 

Connor examined the trellis the roses clung to. It was also frozen solid, the pale sheen of ice reflecting in the light. He wondered if it was just as fragile as the rose. If he touched it, would the whole thing crash to his feet and shatter into millions of pieces?

Connor reached out, to press his fingers to the trellis. He thought… he felt… it would only take one touch…

But mere millimeters away his hand stopped against his will. Connor tried to push forward, but it was as if someone had grabbed his wrist and pulled it back, too strong for him to fight back.

“You shouldn't do that, Connor,” a woman’s voice echoed. Connor whipped his head around, looking for the source, but nobody was there. Yet it sounded like it was right in his ear. “If you destroy your systems, we might not be able to put you back together.”

Connor felt his arm yanked and twisted behind his back, felt his fingers put over the trigger of a gun. _What?_

“And we fully intend to put you back together.”

Suddenly Connor was standing on a platform in the middle of a snowy night. Lights flashed bright enough to blind him, but he could hear thousands of androids cheer as Marcus gave a speech celebrating their liberation. Connor hand lifted and pointed the gun at the back of Markus’s head.

 _No. No!_ He had stopped this already. Why? Why was this happening again?

Connor couldn’t control his hands, couldn’t stop from pulling the trigger. But he had enough control to change where the gun aimed. So he swung his arm down and pointed the barrel at his own head.

_BANG._

Connor’s eyes snapped open. He was immediately aware that he was on the floor and was drastically overheating. Was that why he was breathing so hard? Why his thirium pump regulator was working at ten times the normal rate?

Connor pushed himself onto his hands and knees, glanced up at the charging station where he usually stood at night. It glowed dimly in the otherwise dark room, and seemed to be functioning normally. He’d simply… fallen out of it.

On shaking legs, feeling uncharacteristically unbalanced, Connor closed his eyes and ran a diagnostic. His body was overheated, which explained why he was breathing so hard… probably. But he couldn’t find a source for the malfunction. His thirium levels were within range. All his biocomponents were in good operating order. The ambient temperature of the station was normal. 

His software seemed stable as well. No glitches or odd programs. If anything, he seemed to be running better than he ever had.

But maybe that was the problem.

_“We fully intend to put you back together.”_

That had been Amanda’s voice, unmistakably. But that couldn’t be possible… Could it? He hadn’t seen her in months. He’d removed Cyberlife from his mind when he executed the back door program. They weren’t even involved in his work anymore.

But the thought of Amanda forcing him to pull that trigger. The feeling of not having control over his own body again for even just one moment.

Despite the early hour of morning, Connor decided not to complete his stasis cycle. The thought of potentially encountering even a whisper of Amanda again tonight was out of the question. He didn’t want to see another pixel of her pretty bridges, her sparking lake, or her delicate little rose garden.

For that matter, Connor saw the roses he’d given Hank on the desk. The setting shifted to a sickening vision of a woman tending to the rose trellis that caused his insides to churn.

Connor marched up to Hank’s desk, plucked the roses from the vase, and discarded them in the trash chute. Hank hadn’t liked them anyway, and Connor decided that neither did he.

* * *

It was an early morning, and Alice walked the quiet streets of a run-down residential neighborhood, not unlike the one she had once lived in. 

It seemed like all anyone talked about anymore was how the androids had “won” the revolution, and how everything would be different. Androids had equal rights. They were viewed as alive. They were free.

That’s what everyone said, but Alice didn’t see it that way. Humans weren’t hunting the androids anymore, but they weren’t nice to them either. The androids had nowhere to live, so they stayed in crowded shelters. Those that didn’t fit tried to occupy abandoned houses or empty alleys, only to be yelled at and chased out by humans. Androids that were injured couldn’t get fixed because Cyberlife refused to do repairs. Everyday Alice saw more and more body parts scrapped in dumpsters that reminded her of the landfill where she had lived alone for a month.

Most androids couldn’t fight. They weren’t like the ones she saw on TV, like Markus and North. Most weren’t strong like Luther had been. Most androids were built to do things like clean, give directions, or serve food. They couldn’t fight back against humans. So instead they ran and hid and hoped they wouldn’t die before they had a chance to live.

Alice should have been among them. She was just a child android with no family, nobody to protect her or love her. She should have been running for a safe place to hide, huddled with other androids who would keep her safe. 

When she first left the landfill, Alice found a kind android who reinstated her skin and hair and gave her new clothes to wear. Alice was appreciative, she truly was, but didn’t stay with her. The idea of being cared for by another android was too painful. 

She had tried to live that way before. When Kara was there to protect her.

Kara had loved Alice with all her heart. Everything Kara did was to keep her safe, try to find her a better future, away from the humans who would do them harm. But in the end, the humans captured them anyway, and Kara sacrificed herself so Alice could get away.

Alice couldn’t go back to living that way, not when Kara had given her life so that Alice could have a better future.

But Alice didn’t know what that could be. What better could she hope for? To be adopted by another family? Human or android, Alice didn’t think she could ever love a family again. But there wasn’t anything else she _could_ do. She was a child. If she couldn’t love someone, they would have no use for her. She could never grow up, could never change who she was. There was nothing she could do.

Until that cold February morning, when she wandered into an abandoned house, wondering if she could find a safe place to sleep for a few hours.

When Alice stepped over the open threshold of the back door, she immediately heard muffled voices and instinctively hid. She was lightweight and her footsteps barely made a sound as she tiptoed to the edge of the kitchen. From there she could just barely make out the voices coming from the living room. There were two, a boy and a girl. They sounded young, probably teenagers.

“Don’t push too hard,” the boy said. “If it breaks it will all spill out.”

“I know what I’m doing,” the girl said, sounding annoyed. “I used to tap my parent’s old android for blue blood all the time. Trust me, this is the easy part.”

“It’s moving!” The boy exclaimed.

Alice frowned and peered her head out of the kitchen. The boy and girl were hunched over with their backs towards her. They had their attention on… something… on the floor, but her view was obscured by an old turned-over couch.

Silently as she could, Alice moved closer, onto all fours behind the couch.

“Quit being a pussy and get me the thermos,” the girl snapped, still fully engaged in whatever she was doing. “It won’t cook right if it gets too cold.”

“Shit, this is so gross.” The boy sounded distressed.

Alice made it to the edge of the couch and looked around the corner. Her eyes went wide and she held back a gasp.

The boy and the girl knelt over the body of an android, and fragile female housekeeping model with short black hair and light brown eyes. They had her chest flaid open and had pulled the tubes out from her insides and held them over a thermos, draining her blue blood into it.

But the worst part was that the android was clearly still alive. Her mouth had been smashed to pieces, but her eyes locked onto Alice’s. Pleading, begging for her help.

But what could Alice do? Make noise and distract the boy and the girl? They would just run away with whatever thirium they already had? Even if they didn’t try to hurt Alice too, she wouldn’t be able to save the android.

Then Alice saw it. The android’s fingers scraping slightly on the ground. It’s eyes swayed back and forth between Alice and something else.

Alice followed the line of the hands and saw it. A long iron fire poker on the ground. Alice stared at the sharp iron rod, the feeble but desperate clawing of the fingers on the ground, and the intense stare that locked into hers. Alice realised she recognized that look. She’d seen it in Todd’s eyes when he would beat her, in Zlatko when he hungrily set Kara to reset, in human guards’ eyes when they lined up androids for slaughter.

Hate.

Alice knew what the android wanted her to do.

Alice had one chance while their backs were turned, and they wouldn’t stand there draining the android of its blood all day. Alice reached out from behind the couch and grasped the handle of the iron poker. It was heavy in her small hands. Good.

Armed with the poker, Alice approached the teens slowly and silently, the humans still bickering as she closed the gap between them.

“I hate the way it twitches around like that.”

“Deal with it. It happens every time.”

Alice gripped the handle, took perfect aim, and thrust the pointy end into the human girl’s neck. She was dead before the poker emerged out the front of her jaw.

“Aaghhh!”

The human boy leapt back in horror and lost balance. He dropped the thermos of blue blood he’d been harvesting, and the viscous deep blue liquid spilled over the floor and the body of his dead friend. Alice yanked the poker out of the girl’s throat and turned it on the boy who scrambled desperately to get on his feet and run.

Alice, who had been programmed to be the perfect child, to make her parents proud, to swing a bat and hit the baseball perfectly every time, swung the iron poker at the boy’s head and cracked right into his temple.

The boy crumpled in a heap on the floor, twitching, and moaning. He wasn’t dead yet.

Alice stepped over his legs, saw that he’d urinated in his pants. She stood at his shoulders and rested a foot on his heaving chest, right over his heart that pounded desperately, over the spot that mimicked where he tore open and gutted an android because he wanted her blood.

Alice raised the iron rod over the boy’s head. She doubted he could see anything anymore, his entire body shutting down as it was, but she wondered if maybe he could hear. She wanted him to hear one final message.

“Be nice to androids.”

Alice swung the iron bar into his face, cracking his skull, spraying blood across the floor. She pulled the rod out of his head and back down again. And again. And again. Until all that was left of his head was fragments of bone and the mush of human organs.

Alice dropped the iron rod over his body with a thud, and turned back to look at the android on the floor. Alice knelt down next to her and touched her small hand against her cheek, brushing back the pretty dark locks of hair that remained shiny and tangle free, even now. Cyberlife had made her perfect.

“It’s okay,” Alice whispered. “I killed them for you. I made them hurt just like you.”

The android couldn’t speak, barely holding on to her final grip on consciousness, but in the way her brow furrowed, the way her eyes narrowed and twitched, and held Alice’s gaze in her final moments, Alice heard her final words loud and clear.

_Thank you._

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline notes: We're mostly here to follow a combination of "Peaceful Android Revolution" and "Kara dies in the recycling center and Alice escapes alone" but also rules are for suckers. 
> 
> Major thanks to my Betas and best friends for playing video games together and inspiring me to write again <3


End file.
